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The issue with the Windows Azure cloud service will no doubt offer food for thought to those organisations concerned about the viability of shifting vital business resources into the cloud.

The problems started at 1:45am GMT with a global outage of Microsoft's Windows Azure service management, which meant that customers using Azure were unable to carry out service management operations.

Microsoft posted an update to its Azure status page stating that the issue should not impact on the availability of storage accounts, although it warned that some currently running hosted services may experience capacity issues.

A following update said that the problem had been traced back to a certificate issue, and that the firm was working on a fix.

At the time of writing, the latest update said that Microsoft was continuing to roll-out the hotfix, and it would progressively enable service management for customers as this progressed.

The company apologised for any inconvenience caused to customers.

Microsoft is one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world, and has previously touted the reliability of its services and datacentres.